


The Epic Sleepy Hollow Season 2 Rewrite

by pirategirljack



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Canon Rewrite, F/M, fixit, full season fix, reasons to hire me to write your show
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 17:04:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4530060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is something I started in article-form at the beginning of the summer, but I decided to continue it as a weird sort of hybrid-fic. I'm going to go episode by episode, periodically, and post a list of keeping / changing / replacing, and then write the new scenes. So not a story, exactly, but better / new content. I'll be specifically looking at un-sidelining the Mills sisters, making Katrina as strong as everyone says she is, giving Frank something to do, and making Henry less of a grovelling waste. </p><p>This is totally my idea of how the season should have gone! I'm just still pissed about how dumb it was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Epic Sleepy Hollow Season 2 Rewrite

So we're keeping:  
The whole surprise-party / Archive / the Key / Henry being a bizarrely adorable captive surrounded by houseplants / it being an illusion thing

Ichabod getting himself out of the box, especially the part where he records a dying message for ABBIE, not for HIS WIFE

Jenny getting herself out of the Warehouse and Henry reading her sins to get what he needs, and every second of the Ichabod Drives An Ambulance thing

Katrina in the cabin stabbing Ol Headless and escaping was pretty cool, so we'll keep that

Most of the Purgatory scenes, because they were great: Andy Brooks helping her to remember he's human, the mirror-contact and the Epic Hug and so many shoulder and hand-grabs afterward, the double and the key and all of that

Getting the Key with Jenny, and Jenny hugging Ichabod and reminding him how to function in the underworld

 

What we're losing:  
Shirtless Headless was the start of him not being an actual villain, and getting totally defanged, so we're ditching that mess

Katrina being IMMEDIATELY recaptured before she even escapes the room

Henry being gifted a fancy set of armor instead of being changed into War directly

Everything about Moloch being in focus, moving normally, and wearing clothes--naked, blurry, not-moving-like-a-human-at-all demon-kings are much scarier and less cheesy

 

What we're adding / changing:  
Katrina’s mind was reeling--it had been only moments since she had been freed from Purgatory, and from the moment the way shattered around her, flinging shards of power in all directions, things had been moving too quickly. The world was too quick, her senses out of sync with the currents of it, and after two hundred odd--extremely odd--years of stillness, of unchanging quiet and creeping horror, she was unprepared for the reality of being back. Of being in a body like any other, one that ages and creaks and changes. Of having to make an effort to contact what had once been her birthright.

But she knew she had to get out. 

Abraham was not what he had been, and there were darker forces even than him about. He was an agent of the Apocalypse, a body given over for Death to have hands to afflict the world with, and willingly so. But he was not the one who “pulled the strings”, as Abigail had said on more than once occasion, as she watched the Witnesses’ struggles through every window and mirror they walked past. It was an effort, then, but not much of one. Now, she couldn’t even tell where the threads of power were.

Abraham was distracted, storming around the house, his steps heavy on the old wooden floors and the axe in his hand sharp as flint and hot as an iron from the fire. He thought her small and biddable. 

She had never been so, not truly.

She waited until Abraham was looking away from the small table he'd deposited her in like so many bags of flour, until Henry, too, was distracted--and then she stabbed Abraham with his own knife, bolted and was out, into the woods, free.

She ran as fast as her legs would carry her, not stopping for the brambles that grabbed at her skirts, nor the trees that blocked her way. She was a deer, fleet and loose. She was a bird, the wind cupped in her wings.

But no, she was a woman, and the air grew thick and hot in her lungs and a pain lanced through her side. She had reached for the power, tried to transform, and had found nothing where there had always been multitudes. She stumbled to a halt in a small clearing where the light lanced down through the trees like an accusation, too bright in her Purgatory-adapted eyes. She sank to her knees in the long grass, and saw that she was bleeding from a dozen bramble-scratches. 

Perhaps the currents of power had moved, like a river moves over time. Perhaps she simply did not know where to look for them. She reached out with her magical senses, reaching with her bleeding hands in all directions, and found that there was power here--but it was not as she knew it. The flavor of it had changed, the strength directed into other directions. She had once drawn her power from nature, and now nature denied her access. 

“This cannot be,” she said, out loud though she knew she must keep quiet to avoid detection, and she threw a hand out, willing a vine, a tree, anything to grow from the clear grass before her. The power surged, roared through her like a forest fire. The ground mounded, new life pushing up through the grass.

It was not a vine.

It was a terrible thing, white and boneless, too soft to be a plant, too rooted to be an animal. It unfurled and where the sun touched it, it blackened and hardened, fissuring itself like the surface of an ember as it tried to writhe out of the light. 

Katrina tuned away, sure she would wretch, and stared at the scratches and dirt on her hands.

“No,” she said, “NO!” And this time when she threw her hand out, the weird not-a-vine burst into flame, roiling like a living thing as it burned, and it smoked and sputtered--and gave away her position.

She heard Abraham’s horse’s hooves pounding through the woods, heard Henry calling to her, his voice smug and cajolling--and edged in a dangerous, hard anger. But she was too horrified, too sickened by what she had done, what had become of her power, and by the time she came back to herself, they were too close.

She ran anyway.

Abraham caught her with an arm around her waist and yanked her up into the saddle, his arm like a bar across her chest as he dragged her home, and she fought him, but she may as well have been a kitten for all the progress she made against his unnatural strength. Henry was at the door when they arrived back, somehow, and he smiled a narrow, dangerous smile.

“Welcome back, mother.”

They took her back to that same room, and tied her to a chair. Henry came toward her with something green and bright in his hands. A necklace--one she knew. Something like the wavers around a fire shimmered around it, but darkly, and she tried to avoid it, but she was tied too securely. It burned when it touched her, and she watched, horrified again, as tendrils of black crawled from it and sank into her skin.

When she looked up, she could see a head on the Horseman’s shoulders, one bald and dead-eyed--but Abraham had an effort to control the birthright of rage he’d been given, and the bony skull fleshed out and was once again her blonde, delicate Abraham. She hadn’t truly believed her still remained in this monster, and yet, here he was.

“Abraham.”

“My love.”

Her chest ached, the emerald felt heavy on her sternum...but already, the panic was fading, the strangeness all around her was starting to feel normal. In the back of her mind, she knew this was not truth--but just now, rattled and disjointed from all she knew, she didn’t care.

Abraham smiled his old human smile, his eyes soft and his lips gentle. “There you are,” he said.

\---

Henry knealt before the mirrored wall in the cellar, and Moloch appeared in the dark, spotted glass, warping reality around him. He was pale, strange, didn’t move like people moved, and Henry adored him.

“She’s here,” he said.

[Keep her,] Moloch said, the words as far from English as they could be, and yet he still understood them as if the language was his own. They sent cold chills down his bones, and he bowed deeper. [She is to be the mother she always should have been, your mother, and Abraham’s dark bride. The mother of all the witchkind. Their bloody goddess.]

Moloch lifted his hand and pushed it against the other side of the mirror, and the glass warped around him, until he could almost step through, almost reach Henry’s bowed head. 

[Take this gift for your loyalty,] he said, and Henry felt the gift of power like a hand on his head, despite how the glass pushed back and reality reasserted itself. Moloch was back in the mirror, but the weight of a mantle of power still laid on him, and it flared up like fire around him. It burned--and it changed him. [You are truly War now,] Moloch said, and Henry felt his hands and arms strengthen, felt his skin harden into black armor. He was taller, fiercer. All the small slights and large grudges of the world glowed at him from all sides, waiting for him to stir them into flame, into conflagration, into war. 

Henry reached to his side and drew a sword made of flame from a scabbard that wasn’t there, and he laughed as the light filled the room with bitter red light and the stones around him trembled and blackened.


End file.
